Instantly, Constantine said, “I’m in.”

“Great,” Lix muttered. “Guess we don’t need to vote, then.”

D folded his arms across his chest. After a silent stare-off with Celian that lasted several long moments, he said, “Silas is behind it. He told her I killed her father, and I got the distinct impression he’s been leading them all to believe the four of us planned a coup…and that she’s got a bull’s-eye on her back.”

Celian’s brows rose. “She thinks you want to kill her?”

“She thinks I want to kill them all.” Disbelief, anger, and pain rang in his voice. He ran a hand over his head and held it there, briefly closing his eyes.

“It does look like she’s pretty mad at you.” Constantine eyed the fresh red gouges on D’s cheek.

“Mad doesn’t even begin to cover it,” D muttered. He touched a hand to his face and winced. “She went ballistic.”

“I’d have paid good money to see that.” Celian’s voice was mild, but there was a hint of laughter behind it. “Our little principessa, angry enough to take you on.”

“She’s angry all right.” But even worse than the anger was the terrible sadness he’d witnessed in a woman he remembered as ebulliently happy and alive. D’s chest constricted at the memory of her tears, the memory of that bottomless well of sorrow he’d glimpsed in her eyes, pain that—wrongly or not—she thought was caused by him. He felt the sudden, violent urge to wring that lying Silas’s neck until it snapped. He slowly walked back to the couch and sat with his arms hanging off his knees.

“The police know what she looks like now,” said Constantine quietly. “They’ll be looking for her.” He looked at D. “And you. It’ll be a lot harder for you to track her now.”

“What did you hear about it on television? Did they report any bodies the police were unable to identify?” D was looking at the floor, hunched over and lost in thought, all the anger from moments before drained from his posture.

“No.” Celian sat forward in his chair. “You hit someone?”

D nodded. “One of The Hunt. They got there the same time I did. If I’d been a few minutes later…” He looked up at Celian, and his eyes burned. “They’re still out there, looking for her.” Then his jaw worked and his voice was shaded with venom. “Seven of the eight, anyway.”

Celian frowned. “The television reports only mentioned that the chief’s right-hand man was slightly injured in the bombing. Apparently there were no other injuries—”

“There was another injured man,” D interrupted. “Human. Injured pretty badly from what I could tell. Glasses. White coat. Looked like a doctor type.”

Celian shook his head. “No mention of him, no mention of any unidentifiable bodies. Leander didn’t mention it, either.”

D’s lips peeled back in an ugly snarl over his teeth, and he sat up, ramrod straight, radiating violence. He growled, “Tell him, from me, that I am going to personally tear off the heads of every one of his little group of assassins—”

“Probably not helpful to the cause at hand,” interrupted Celian.

“—and if any of them harm a single hair on her head, I’ll come after him and his entire colony myself! I’ll go Old Testament biblical on them. I’ll rain fire and brimstone on that mother—”

“Again,” Celian said, louder, harder, “not helpful. Our objective is to buy you more time to find Eliana and bring her in, not start a tribal war!”

D ground his teeth, stood, and began to pace back and forth in taut, smoldering menace in front of Celian’s table. He flexed his hands open and closed, itching to get them around someone’s neck. “She’s just going to keep running from me. She thinks I want her and the others dead. She thinks I killed her father—”

“You didn’t tell her?” From across the room, Constantine’s voice was low and shocked, and his expression was shocked, too. “You didn’t tell her what happened? That it was me who pulled the trigger?”

D kept right on pacing. “That’s your story to tell, brother, not mine.”

Moving slowly, Constantine walked to the table where Celian sat and sank into the opposite chair. He ran a hand through his thick, black hair, blew out a breath, and shook his head in wonder, watching D pace.

“There’s got to be a way for me to prove to her that whatever Silas told her about us, it’s all lies.”

“Except for the killing her father part.” Constantine dropped his gaze to the table. “That part’s actually true.”

“He was going to kill me, Trollboy.” D used the nickname he hadn’t used since they were both children, teasing each other about everything from girls to their looks. Constantine was Trollboy because he was anything but, and, accordingly, D had been dubbed Chatterbox. “He was a batshit crazy bastard who terrorized our entire colony and sunk a knife in my chest when he found out I went on a date with his daughter. You just had my back.” D slowed his pacing and lifted his head to look at Constantine. “Guess I never said thanks for that.”

“No,” said Constantine, “you didn’t.”

“Well…thanks for that.”

With those few words, Constantine knew that the rancor between them from the last three years had been forgiven. D held his gaze for a beat, nodded, and then resumed his restless pacing.

“So my problem is, unless I have some kind of proof that Silas is no good, Eliana will just keep running forever.”

“Like, written proof?” Lix piped in. Three pairs of questioning eyes turned to look at him, and he stared back at them, waiting for them to guess. When they didn’t he rolled his eyes and said, “The journal, geniuses. Her father’s journal. We still have it.”

The air went electric.

The journal of the mad King Dominus had been found after he’d been killed and the princess and her retinue had fled the catacombs of Rome that night three years ago. It outlined—in meticulous detail—his plan to take over the other colonies, his genocide against his own people, the genetic testing he’d commissioned, which resulted in a serum that allowed human and Ikati blood to be compatible. Like all sadistic megalomaniacs, his ultimate goal had been world domination. He was going to put the Ikati back at the top of the food chain, using human DNA and fertility to do it.

And then he was going to wipe them off the face of the earth.

Silas—his trusted servant, equally sadistic and power-hungry—had been assisting him with all of that.

D looked at Celian. “How soon can you—”

“Twenty-four hours, maybe sooner if we leave right now.”

“You’ll call Leander on the way?”

Celian nodded, rising from the table. “I can’t guarantee he’ll call The Hunt off Eliana’s trail, but I’ll get you a few more days. We’ll figure it out from there. You better work fast, though.”

Constantine rose as well. “Do you have any idea where she might have gone from here? How are you going to track her?”

D smiled, and it was almost gleeful, the happiest any of them had seen him in years. “While I was taking a little nap thanks to your tranquilizer, I had a dream, brother.” He tapped his temple. “I had a dream.”

The first bullet screamed by Eliana’s right ear, and the second embedded itself into the wall next to her head at eye level with an ominous thunk that dislodged a puff of smoke and spat razor-fine chunks of drywall right into her face. Clutching Gregor’s hand, she threw up an arm and twisted away, cursing.

“How many of these bastards are there?” Gregor shouted, barreling down the stairs three at a time, dragging Eliana along like a sack of rocks behind him.

Just before the third shot rang out—another near miss that ricocheted off the metal handrail with a high-pitched, ringing twang—Eliana shouted back, “Seven!”

The ferocity of their pursuit made it seem more like seventy. She felt each one of them as separate, stinging waves of heat across the surface of her skin, their silent intent to kill her as clear as if they’d screamed it. Four Ikati assassins behind and three more somewhere nearby, unseen beyond the walls, moving fast on different floors of the building.